Science Fiction round-up: review

Peter Ingham assesses a clutch of apocalyptic science fiction novels,
including The Sign by Raymond Khoury, in which a sphere of light appears
over the Antarctic, and Tide of Souls by Simon Bestwick, which contains
flesh-eating zombies with green-glowing eyes

The world is drowning – fiction’s apocalypse du jour – and the survival of humankind depends on building a faster-than-light spacecraft and sending a crew to colonise a new Earth. How, who and where are the central concerns of the first half of Ark, Stephen Baxter’s sequel to his well-received Flood, and the interstellar voyage itself, the second. Baxter is the natural heir to the hard sci-fi crown of Arthur C Clarke, with whom he collaborated, and he shares Clarke’s generous imagination and ability to extrapolate a plausible future technology from the cutting-edge theories of today. He also shares with Clarke a pedestrian prose style that tends to blunt the climaxes and flatten the characterisation. But imaginative appeal is what counts with Baxter and in that he delivers reliably.

A wondrous sphere of light appears over the collapsing Antarctic ice-shelf. Is it a warning from God about humankind’s mismanagement of the planet? No: Raymond Khoury’s latest book is not a treatise on spirituality or environmentalism. Instead, this is the starting point for a pulse-pounding thriller that spans continents in pursuit of an audacious if implausible hi-tech conspiracy to reshape the global balance of power, told in 85 punchy chapters, which cries out Hollywood blockbuster. Khoury’s characters include a spirited female television reporter and her sidekick cameraman, a hard-nut ex-con in search of his brother, the saintly Father Jerome, an internet billionaire, a ruthless mercenary enforcer and an evil neocon policy-maker – who together make it an exciting ride.

You might think that a drowning world would be apocalyptic enough by itself to sustain a novel – it worked for J G Ballard. But in Tide of Souls, part of Abaddon’s Tomes of the Dead zombie series, the rising waters have reanimated the dead as flesh-eating monsters with green glowing eyes. This is what Katja, a young Polish woman trafficked to Britain, McTarn, an ex-soldier with a past and Stiles, the scientist with the solution, must battle through to save the world. This sounds like a plot for the computer game Resident Evil, and with lashings of violence and gore, it could easily be dismissed as lurid pulp fiction, but it is saved by the quality of the writing. Simon Bestwick writes with great imaginative flair and an excellent grasp of colour and narrative pace. If you are going somewhere hot, this will chill the spine nicely.

The arrival of an amnesiac stranger in a primitive community is hardly an original plot device, but it is a hardy one and Jaine Fenn has built an equally sturdy narrative on it. The stranger, Sais, fallen from the sky, is nursed to health by Karin, the semi-outcast mother of the “sky-touched” Damaru. Together they join the annual cattle drive to the City of Light, where Damaru’s mystical gifts will be tested by the theocrats. This journey takes about half the book but when they reach the city, Sais abruptly regains his memory and Fenn changes gear and genre. After a hasty exposition, what has read as fantasy suddenly becomes space opera. The mysteries of Sais’s past and Damaru’s future become entwined, resulting in an explosive finale.